Reflections on making my first video

I started a post-graduate course in professional writing at Deakin University’s cloud campus this year. When I first read that part of the assessment criteria for my digital media subject was to write and film a seven minute video, I had mixed feelings of foreboding and excitement. Production of video content is without doubt, an essential part of creating an effective online strategy. This opportunity was the perfect catalyst for beginning my video-creation career, but one that seemed exceptionally challenging considering my lack of experience. Throughout this study period, I began to experiment with the video format by producing a few short, thirty-second to one-minute videos, but nothing even close to seven minutes.

So, how did I manage to bring this task to life?

I settled on crowdfunding as my chosen topic as a starting point. The task from there was to narrow the topic to something that could be reasonably covered in seven minutes of video. I scaled the content back to cover only reward-based crowdfunding and specifically, the reasons for successes or failures of campaigns, and the factors that motivate participants. Initially, I reached out to my connections on LinkedIn and Facebook and asked if anyone with experience either founding or backing crowdfunding campaigns would be interested in taking part in an on-camera interview. The response was overwhelmingly underwhelming! Regardless of the reason for this, due to the time-consuming nature of video-editing, I knew it was essential to finalise my video content and script hastily. So, I quickly jumped to Plan B, gathered resources and composed a script that I would present. I used scholarly sources to inform parts of the video discussing reasons for success or failure of campaigns, and motivators for participants. The specific case studies I found were gathered from a combination of industry blogs, successful product websites and crowdfunding platforms.

Having discounted the option of interviewees, I set out to find quality images and video that could support my visual presentation in a way that was both engaging for the audience and ensured I didn’t have to be speaking directly to the camera for the entire time. I found a variety of images, video clips and a music track from Creative Commons sources such as Pixabay, Flickr and CCMixter that I could use legally and without financial cost. I purchased one image from iStock photo for my intro and outro-sequences because I wanted a high-quality image that I could reuse for future episodes of my resulting Business & Tech Focus video creation.

I used Movavi video editor to bring together all of the elements I had gathered and recorded for my video. The program is very user-friendly but I found that the quality of some of my video files was compromised after I had clipped and inserted blending transitions. Being a professional photographer, I know which file types to use when editing still images to avoid loss of file quality, but I need to research this for application to video-editing to avoid this problem in future. I recorded my voice using an app on my iPhone which produced fairly clear results but I am also not completely happy with the transitions between clips and detectable differences in sound between segments. This is another area I will be researching for future development.

I mastered the Chroma Key technique by filming my introductory and closing comments in front of a green screen which I later clipped in Movavi so I could superimpose my video image over the iStock photo background. I initially intended to superimpose my image into a virtual newsroom studio, but didn’t like any of the free options available; I didn’t feel they were authentic to the style I wanted to portray. The remainder of the presentation was put together in the style of a TV journalists’ filed report.

The resulting video is below! Feel free to leave any comments or feedback here, or on my YouTube channel.

This video was created using a combination of footage from Canon 5D III DSLR Camera, Voice Recordings from iPhone, and audio, image and video resources from creative commons sources.